As budget pressures become more competitive, it will be up to Japan's experts and taxpayers to consider what approach will best serve the nation's needs for space exploration — not bureaucrats and politicians.

Shadows of winter clouds Run over the ocean Just before sunset It’s a pretty haiku, but it becomes quite extraordinary when you learn that it was written aboard the International Space Station (ISS) by astronaut Koichi Wakata, who tweeted it to his 50,000 followers ...

When future historians document the story of Japanese space exploration, 2009 will likely figure as the year when the nation put two high-profile rocket launch failures, in 1999 and 2003, firmly behind it and, quite literally, took off. In June, the nation’s first blueprint ...